Lost in Translation: Thinking in French, Marching in English
International Mother Language Day is a reminder that language is more than vocabulary or grammar, it is also identity, culture, and comfort. In this piece, Québécois MAASIN member Laetitia Miron shares her story of marching drum corps while thinking in French and performing in English, and the quiet exhaustion that comes from constant translation. Her reflection challenges us as educators to move beyond assumptions, and remember that even the most fluent-passing multi-lingual marchers are still actively translating every single day.
When I was in secondary school, at age 12, I was moved up from the regular group to the advanced one for English class. I felt very proud at the time: I had spent the previous summer reading books in English instead of French to set myself up for this. I felt confident in my English skills within my local context. My knowledge and understanding of the language on paper only improved from then and have never really been the issue. So, what was the issue, then? If I knew English coming in, I knew what I was getting myself into… Right? Well, not exactly.
I started doing drum corps and touring the United States when I was 14 years old, but even then, I was still with a Canadian team and surrounded by French speakers. The next year, I joined an American team with a couple of friends, and after that, from age 16 to 21, I found myself being the only person speaking French in every team I joined.
Throughout all these years, I had a range of experiences with these teams with one guiding thread: every day I woke up and, as my brain formulated thoughts and experienced the world in French, everything around me happened in English. And secondary school English class did not prepare me for how exhausting that would be.
Nobody could have prepared me for how fast people spoke, how many accents I’d encounter, how much slang would be used or how many colloquialisms people had, or even how there would not be any subtitles to help me catch up if I got lost halfway through a sentence.
People experience this if they travel to another country; it’s not lost on me how common of a feeling this overload may be. However, experiencing this every day at drum corps added a layer of tiredness when I was already running pretty low on energy by the nature of the activity. Translating everything “in and out” (how I like to describe understanding and then answering) - or trying to - meant deploying effort and allocating a constant amount of energy to the process, in an activity where energy is a finite and precious resource.
I was always tired at drum corps: physically, mentally, emotionally… You name it, I’m sure we’ve all experienced it. But while I got to take a 5-minute power nap at lunch if my body needed to rest, to rely on my muscle memory in reps where I couldn’t find my focus, or to take moments to myself and process certain feeling I needed to, I didn’t have an out for the constant language input and output. Except maybe for that one day in 2021 where I started crying in ensemble late at night and told a staff member, “I can’t speak English anymore”. And to his credit, he showed me nothing but grace and understanding.
Except grace and understanding are not necessarily a given in this activity, and they were especially not as I grew up and tried my best to speak English for some people who might not have realized the position they put me in and how their reactions shaped my experience. Across my marching years, I usually found myself labeled as one of two concepts others had of who I was and how I experienced the world. Which concept depended on the years and the people in front of me.
For the first one, most often when I started marching or when I was quieter, people, particularly staff, assumed I didn’t understand anything. With this assumption often came an idea that it was a waste of time to talk to me directly. “Make sure she understood that,” is a sentence I’ve heard more than once from the box as my name was called - not directed at me, of course, but usually at a staff on the field close to me who was supposed to explain things in simple terms for me.
The worst part was that those were definitely not the moments I usually struggled to understand: a single person speaking over a microphone loud and clear, about something I did, while everyone else was stopped to listen… Yeah, sure, I understood that. But often, my name was thrown around in front of blocks or over the microphone without addressing me directly, like I wasn’t even there. And nobody ever really bothered to ask me what I actually understood.
For the second concept people had of me, they would simply forget English is my second language, even if I told them I spoke French. It’s like the information was somewhere in their brain, but never fresh enough. They would assume I spoke English without any issues. It was often later in my marching years, when I could speak English in a way that mostly “blends” with the rest of the group.
Some staff members would be more unforgiving, or lose their patience with me when I wouldn’t understand a word they would say. It’s as if they thought I was doing it on purpose or challenging the comment they were giving me. I would repeat that English is my second language, and it would take time, and sometimes fellow members to help them understand that I was really struggling, but eventually I would get an answer to my question - not without frustration along the way, though. Sometimes, it felt like I could only be perceived as one extreme or the other.
Throughout the years, I found myself simply wishing for less assumptions and for more questions instead. Assuming one extreme or another about my understanding of English didn’t bring me the support or treatment I wish I received, even when I expressed myself on it. I think that’s the frustrating part: that I would say how I felt about my English skills and what I needed, and that it would still be trumped by assumptions people made based on what I looked like or sounded like. Or even based on what my name is, and how it’s pronounced.
My name, a giveaway of my French and Quebec roots, was a source of stress for me when I was marching, and it shouldn’t have been. I was spending so much time training myself to pronounce English words the “American way”, and getting frequently corrected when I was wrong. I wish people, especially staff members, could have offered the same effort for the singular word that is my first name. Instead, as I would introduce myself and pronounce my name correctly, some people would make a fuss about it. It would end up being pronounced wrong or being shortened. I even had a staff member call me “Canada” for an entire summer. While there is probably something to say about asserting myself more, I was young, and there were also so many power dynamics that felt scary to challenge. And there was always this assumption that this was okay. But was it?
No one could really know what I was thinking because they were not in my brain. And even if they were, they’d probably be lost: it’s all French in there. So, really, all I want is for people to ask. Ask me what I understand and what actually helps me. Ask me how to say my name. Ask me again if you need to. I don’t mind. Just ask. It takes a couple of seconds. And when I tell you, please listen. It makes a world of a difference.
Laetitia Miron
MAASIN Women’s Caucus Chair
Laetitia Miron (she/her), a Québécois educator and performer, has stepped into a full time teaching role after 13 years of performing and is currently a choreographer and technician at Third Legend Independent World. She has been a member of MAASIN since the fall of 2024 and currently serves on the Public Education committee, as well being the Women’s Caucus chair. She is a PhD student of Sociology at the University of Cincinnati.